What if politicians talked like hockey players?

I stopped by the Continental Barbershop the other day, where Coun. John DeCicco dispenses haircuts and presides over political debates.

As he finished up with a customer, he was getting the what-for about the parkade.

“I just think we should leave the park alone,” the fellow said.

“It’s a parking lot,” John insisted, explaining, again, that the new parkade won’t impede the view of Riverside Park.

DeCicco regularly gets an earful on everything from potholes to bus fares and water meters — it’s the price of running a business on Main Street. Other members of council hear from people a little less directly — via emails and phone calls.

In his column in Monday’s Daily News, Mayor Peter Milobar acknowledged the recent controversies around the parkade and social housing, putting them in the context of sustainability planning.

“If nothing else,” he wrote, “they have shown us that as we move forward with considering the sustainability of issues, it is the gray not the black-or-white, that will create the discussion in the community.”

True words, maybe, but will we remember them? There’s a growing conviction that council is experiencing a failure to communicate, that, contrary to what the mayor says, there’s actually too much gray and not enough black and white.

Maybe if the mayor and council tried harder to connect in a way that would interest people, they’d have better luck — maybe, in other words, if they stopped talking like politicians and started talking like hockey players.

For example, politicians love moving forward. Every politician in the land must speak of “moving forward” at least a dozen times per day. Nobody knows what it means anymore.

Instead, how about, “We need to create chances, and play our own game”? Or, better yet, as Canuck Ryan Kessler said, “I just slid it five-hole.”

“Sustainability” is another one. Everything these days has to be “sustainable.” It’s meaning has become fuzzy.

But if a politician were to say, “We gotta give it 110 per cent, and get pucks on the net,” now we’re getting somewhere. It’s black and white — either you’re getting pucks on the net (and to do that, of course, you gotta generate traffic in front of the net) or you’re not.

So, instead of saying what he said, the mayor might have tried this: “Sure, the puck doesn’t always bounce our way, but we know what we gotta do and we’re gonna go out there and do it.”

In other words, we have a plan, and it’s going to be sustainable, and we’ll deliver.

Or, more succinctly, in the words of our own Mark Recchi, “We’re gonna do whatever it takes.”

I’m not picking on the mayor, or on Coun. DeCicco, but if they and the rest of council stopped to think about where people’s heads are at right now, they’d realize it’s in the hockey rink, not in council chambers.

Roberto Luongo doesn’t talk in terms of “focusing on the issues.” No, Bobby Lou cuts to the chase: “We didn’t sit back; we came out and played the way we were supposed to play and got the job done.”

If they tried, if they stood on their heads, if they showed up for 60 minutes and left it all out on the ice, I’m confident council would soon find, as that great diplomat Raffi Torres declared, “We’re putting wins on the board.”